By Gabe Teninbaum
My name is Gabe Teninbaum (on Twitter at @GTeninbaum). I'm a professor, as well as the Assistant Dean for Innovation, Strategic Initiatives, & Distance Education, at Suffolk Law in Boston. I'm also a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project. My work focuses on legal innovation, technology, and the changing business of law. Every day, I digest tons of content on these topics. The goal of this newsletter is to curate the most interesting, valuable, and thought-provoking of these ideas and share them with you.
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The Appetizer: Sponsors
SpacedRepetition.com is a tool to help law students & bar preppers learn more using cutting-edge science. Called the single most effective technique to learn by the American Psychological Association. More than 17,000 users spread across every law school in the U.S.
The Main Course: 5 Things That Made Me Think This Week
Product Walk Throughs Are Good: Law Sites Blog recently posted a video demo of Woodpecker, a document assembly tool for small firms and solos. Another favorite site, Artificial Lawyer, posted a product walk through of Gavelytics, a litigation analytics platform. These demos are terrific (Woodpecker and Gavelytics look cool, but I mean the concept of product walk-throughs generally) and I can't fathom why this isn't more common. There are now *lots* of legal tech products, but it's hard to really know what they do through the marketing copy. So why not film and post short videos to show off the coolest features?
Wolters Kluwer Future Ready Lawyer Report, 2021: I downloaded and read this free report from Wolters Kluwer, and it was excellent (download link here. You provide your contact info then can download the PDF). One finding that stuck out for me is that the two trends legal professionals predict will have the biggest impact on their organizations over the next three years are "Increasing Importance of Legal Technology" (77%); and "Coping with Increased Volume and Complexity of Information" (77%). Yet, only 33% say their organization is very prepared to address the "Increasing Importance of Legal Technology" and only 32% are very prepared to address "Coping with Increased Volume and Complexity of Information." Sort of a strange spread...though as someone who teaches these exact things, I am excited for the opportunities for students learning it.
Free Law Project's Federal Judge Financial Conflict Database: the Free Law Project has launched a hugely impressive project containing the investment and conflict information for every federal judge. Spanning 17 years, this database was extracted from over 250,000 pages of judicial financial records. All of this data will be made available to researchers, and is the subject of a series of articles by the Wall Street Journal, kicking off with this one, which has already identified some questionable behavior from this research.
The Law is (Not) Code: for the last few decades, legal techies and futurists have envisioned law as a system where legal concepts could be written as computer code, thus opening the door to new efficiencies, like smart contracts. In this essay, Richard Tromans of Artificial Lawyer, argues that the law isn't code...and that's a good thing.
Why The Time For Better Contract Design Is Now: World Commerce & Contracting has long been a vocal advocate for simpler, user-centered contracts. But what does good contract design look like, in practice? And how do you make a compelling business case for it in your organization? Legal tech wiz Olga Mack inteviewed Stefania Passera, contract designer in residence, and Paula Doyle, chief legal innovation officer — who lead WorldCC’s design and simplification initiatives — to discuss their most recent initiatives.
The Fez-Maker of Cairo: this short documentary shows how one of the last fez makers in Egypt runs a 130-year old shop, using 600 year old equipment, to make custom fezzes. I had no idea how controversial they've been in Egypt and Turkey (at times, it was standard to wear one; at other times, wearing one would land you in jail). Plus, it was cool to see a craftsman at work. This video is a cool combo of tradition, culture, and history.